‘The Outrun’ Review: Saoirse Ronan Is a Turbulent Force as a Recovering Alcoholic Finding Strength in Nature

Saoirse Ronan puts herself through the physical and emotional wringer in The Outrun as a young Scottish woman repeatedly redefining her rock bottom before finally summoning the resolve to control her alcohol addiction. Following System Crasher, about a traumatized girl with violent anger issues, and The Unforgivable, which cast Sandra Bullock as an ex-con struggling to regain her place in the world, German director Nora Fingscheidt’s third narrative feature continues her visceral explorations of the scarred female psyche. The drama is often punishing, but it’s punctuated throughout by beacons signaling the transcendent power of nature.

The film is adapted from the well-received memoir by Amy Liptrot, a native of Scotland’s wild and wind-battered Orkney Islands who wrote with candor about her alcoholism, grounding her account in contemplations of the natural world around her, from its science to its mythology.

The Outrun

The Bottom Line

Elemental liberation.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves
Director: Nora Fingscheidt
Screenwriters: Nora Fingscheidt, Amy Liptrot, based on Liptrot’s memoir

1 hour 58 minutes

Those side notes — covering everything from folkloric tales of seals coming ashore as humans to beachcomber found-object art, maritime history, bird migration paths and a legend about the monster that gave birth to the Northern Isles — give the story a discursive aspect. Various interludes embrace documentary, philosophy and poetry, employing means that range from archival footage and photographs to animation.

Having so many narrative detours is a bold stroke, even if it results in some imperfect metaphors, the extensive voiceover emphasizes the material’s literary origins and the extracurricular ruminations don’t always optimize the flow. On the other hand, those deviations feed into a highly atmospheric sense of place, as well as laying the foundations for the communion with nature that will ultimately provide Ronan’s character, Rona, with a way forward.

Fingscheidt calls these seemingly random, sometimes scholarly thoughts, plucked from brainy biologist Rona’s restless mind, the story’s “nerd layer,” and they certainly enhance the texture of what might otherwise have been a downbeat slog to get to the optimistic outcome. The underwater images of seals are especially beautiful.

To be completely honest, I often wonder who addiction dramas are for, besides actors looking for a gritty challenge, to shrug off vanity and get messy. It’s been a long time since films about the downward spiral of alcoholism, like Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend or Blake Edwards’ Days of Wine and Roses, provided much in the way of raw shock. That said, a distinctive setting and imaginative narrative embellishment can make the desolation of unhealthy dependency compelling. That and magnetic performers hurling themselves into the addict roles. The Outrun has those pluses in its favor.

Rona has returned to Orkney after 10 years in London, looking to maintain the fragile equilibrium she established after a long voluntary stint in rehab. Her parents are separated, so she lives with her religious convert mother, Annie (Saskia Reeves), but helps out on the sheep farm where her bipolar father, Andrew (Stephen Dillane), lives in a caravan, having been forced by financial need to sell the family farmhouse.

As Rona tends to the farming demands of lambing season, reminders of her raucous drunken days in London rupture her thoughts like shards of glass, with the thumping techno music that accompanies many of those memories pounding away in her headphones. She’s seen violently resisting before being kicked out of a pub at closing time or growing hostile after getting out of control in a dance club and being refused service at the bar.

We witness the tender beginnings of her relationship with Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), but also the limits of his appetite for hardcore partying compared to Rona’s. Soon, she’s stashing alcohol around the apartment they share, and one explosive outburst too many causes him to move out.

Recollections of her time in rehab and the shame and self-doubt she shares with fellow alcoholics also surface in a timeline shuffled between London, the present-day Orkey Islands and her childhood there. “I cannot be happy sober,” she says to another AA attendee in a despondent moment.

These thoughts collide also with memories of her father’s manic highs when she was a girl, smashing windows and welcoming the gale-force winds like a conductor in front of an orchestra, eventually forcing Annie to leave him. The older Andrew initially seems more stable. But while Rona is still fighting internally not to fall off the wagon, he slides into a catatonic funk and then, like the waves crashing on the rocky shoreline, gets fired up with feverish talk about converting his property into a wind farm. Dillane captures the wild swings of bipolar disorder with heartbreaking effectiveness.

The tentative turning point comes when Rona takes a job working with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, surveying every inhabited island of Orkney for corncrakes, a once-prolific species whose numbers have plummeted, putting it on the endangered list. The job is monotonous at first, leaving her too much time to think. But when she finds herself stranded, at first reluctantly and then by choice, in a tiny no-frills bird warden house on one of the most remote islands, she begins to see what the possibility of peace and liberation might feel like.

There’s no magical epiphany in the screenplay, just an accumulation of experiences, from Rona’s interactions with the friendly local community to her increasing immersion in nature, right down to icy dips in the sea during which she howls with joy at bobbing seals. The final scenes become almost operatic as she stands on a clifftop “commanding” the wind and waves, seeming to seize control over her most self-destructive impulses for the first time she can remember.

Ronan’s emotionally charged performance makes those highly theatrical closing images transporting, even if they’re more than a tad overwrought. There’s no effort to soften Rona or make her less abrasive, but her hard-won serenity becomes a poignant fight. The real strength of Fingscheidt’s storytelling is how the director, like her main character, harnesses the elements, a theme carried through in cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer’s arresting images of the dramatic landscape and thundering sea, and in the score by John Gürtler and Jan Miserre.

The Outrun — the title refers to tracts of outlying grazing land on arable farms — is slightly overlong and at times feels cluttered. But it depicts the protagonist’s brutal struggle with enough distinctive elements — in every sense of the word — to make it more than just another draining addiction story.

Full credits

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
Production companies: Brock Media, Arcade Pictures, in association with Weydemann Bros., StudioCanal
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves
Director: Nora Fingscheidt
Screenwriters: Nora Fingscheidt, Amy Liptrot, based on Liptrot’s memoir
Producers: Sarah Brocklehurst, Dominic Norris, Jack Lowden, Saoirse Ronan
Executive producers: Claudia Yusef, Kieran Hannigan, Maria Logan, Anne Sheehan, Luane Gauer, George Hamilton, James Pugh, Janina Vilsmaier
Director of photography: Yunus Roy Imer
Production designer: Andy Drummond
Costume designer: Grace Snell
Music: John Gürtler, Jan Miserre
Editor: Stephan Bechinger
Casting: Caroline Stewart, Kahleen Crawford
Sales: Protagonist Pictures, CAA

1 hour 58 minutes